Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Give a man an Oscar, and he turns into Sally Field. He may be a European intellectual full of skeptical opinions about the cultural imperialism of American movies. His film may have been snubbed by several Hollywood studios and mishandled by the company that finally distributed it. But hand him a gold-plated statuette in front of a billion people, and he finds heroic resources of good feeling. Just ask Bernardo Bertolucci. "It's incredible," the Italian filmmaker, 47, geysered the day after his The Last Emperor swept the Oscar ceremony. "First it was one award, then two, three, four...
...burghers of Hollywood, however, were not initially impressed. Producer Jeremy Thomas had to raise his $23.8 million budget independently, while Bertolucci secured precedent-setting rights to film in the Forbidden City. Only after shooting did David Puttnam, head of Columbia Pictures, agree to distribute Emperor in America. Before the film was released, Puttnam resigned under fire, and the new administration has treated its gift horse like a Trojan horse. Even now the film is playing in only 882 North American theaters...
...Hollywood standards, The Last Emperor is a supremely daring film. Instead of following the normal emotional trajectory of movie epics -- struggle, triumph, despair, reconciliation -- Bertolucci's film runs a slalom course of disillusionment. In worldly or heroic terms, Pu Yi attains nothing. He loses his power, then his title, then his freedom. Nor is Pu Yi personally attractive; he can be both toady and bully. "He's not a sympathetic character," says Screenwriter Mark Peploe, who is Bertolucci's brother-in- law. "I resisted even trying to understand him when I wrote the script." But any alert viewer can understand...
European filmmakers often view Hollywood as an artistic Alcatraz where slaves to convention are blinkered from the ferment of the outside world. In the '60s, as a prodigy auteur with the smartest, most restless camera style in the business, Bertolucci was a charter member of the first generation of directors who were bred to break the rules of narrative film. Before the Revolution (1964) and The Conformist (1970) swooned with infatuation for radical politics and complex storytelling. With Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bertolucci looked to have conquered Hollywood on his own terms. Its desperate, soft-core...
...York is the Big Apple," Bertolucci said on Oscar night, "then Hollywood is the Big Nipple." He meant that American movies have nurtured filmmakers worldwide, even those who view it with reservations. The director always had a Hollywood-size appetite for the epic, with Gone With the Wind as the main course. His tidiest, loveliest film, The Spider's Stratagem (1970), is set in an Italian town called Tara; his most ambitious work, 1900 (1976), is a folk epic spanning 70 years of Italian history -- a Gone With the Wind gone red. Red ink too: the film, cut from...